d War One, extended further. When I was a child, our system of ideology and
mass media still protected that story, but in the last thirty years the incursions of reality
have punctured its protective shell and have ruptured its essential infrastructure.
We no longer believe our storytellers, our elites. We don’t believe the politicians, we don’t
believe the doctors, we don’t believe the professors, we don’t believe the bankers, we don’t
believe the technologists. All of them imply that everything is under control, and we know that
it is not.
We have lost the vision of the future we once had; most people have no vision of the future at
all. This is new for our society. Fifty or a hundred years ago, most people agreed on the general
outlines of the future. We thought we knew where society was going. Even the Marxists and the
capitalists agreed on its basic outlines: a paradise of mechanized leisure and scientifically
engineered social harmony, with spirituality either abolished entirely or relegated to a materially
inconsequential corner of life that happened mostly on Sundays. Of course there were dissenters
from this vision, but this was the general consensus.
When a story nears its end it goes through death throes, an exaggerated semblance of life.
So today we see domination, conquest, violence, and separation take on absurd extremes that
hold a mirror up to what was once hidden and diffuse. The year 2012 ended with just such a
potent story-disrupting event: the Sandy Hook massacre. Even realizing that far more, equally
innocent, children have been killed in the last few years by, say, U.S. drone strikes, it really got
under my skin. No one was immune. I think that is because its utter senselessness penetrated
every defense mechanism we have to maintain the fiction that the world is basically OK. Unlike
9/11 or Oklahoma City, and certainly unlike the horrors that go on around the world, there was
no convenient narrative to divert the raw pain of what happened. We cannot help but map those
murdered innocents onto the young faces we know, and the anguish of their parents onto
ourselves.
At the base of our Story of the People is separation, of humanity from nature, of me
from you, of each from all, and this event united everyone, of whatever culture, nationality,
or political persuasion. For a moment, we all felt the exact same thing. For at least a moment,
I am sure, most people were in touch with the simplicity of what is important; I am sure many
people had that fleeting feeling, “It doesn’t have to be that difficult, if only we could
remember what is so obvious now, that love is all there is.”
We humans have made such a mess of things, forgetting LOVE. It is the same realization we
have when a loved one is going through the dying process, and we think, “Ah, how precious this
person is – why couldn’t I see that? Why couldn’t I appreciate all those moments we had together?
All the arguments and grudges seem so tiny now.”
Charles Eisenstein
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is run by the Chartered Institute of Building.
I have used my own best Eight of Twelve choice of these images, below, to illustrate ... E I G H T B U C K Y I D E A S T O S A V E T H E P L A N E T A N D Y O U R S A N I T Ythat Patricia Ravasio has published in her True Story • The Girl from Spaceship Earth •
You’ll find the author's blog at BuckyIdeas.com. Please visit there to read about Buckminster Fuller's IDEAS for today and for news about upcoming events and books.FORM FOLLOWS IDEA examines the work and ideas of influential designers Ralph Ball and Maxine Naylor. Their reflections and propositions provide a refreshing and provocative approach to design, touching on issues such as craftsmanship, modernism, and the role of nature and commercialism in design. Ball and Naylor's work explores ideas of space beyond the physical object. Their concern with cultural and social values is manifest in the form and (dis)function of their designs and appropriations of everyday objects, such as chairs, lights and shelving. FORM FOLLOWS IDEA features their approach to these objects through cultural, ecological and visual narratives. As such, their book provides a playful yet critical re-evaluation of familiar forms and typologies.
ALL of which I would dedicate to my fleeting relationship with Eric R Kuhne and his LOVE of BOOKS and every[THING] related to the SPiRALogic • ART of the POSSIBLE
"Rugged textured cable pipes ran over my head at a train station in New York, creating a trance-like, frightful pattern," says Gautam Kamat Bambolkar. "They ran from the edge of the entrance to an infinite end. It looked nothing less than a scary man-made cave." 1. Embrace abundance, not scarcity. Humans are falsely conditioned by the notion of scarcity promoted by Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus. The idea of survival of the fittest sets up an us-versus-them mentality. If we believe there is not enough for all, overconsumption and greed are natural results. Only by embracing abundance and setting out to prove there is enough for all can we achieve Bucky’s overriding objective, “To make the world work for one hundred percent of all humanity in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological damage or harm to any individual.” In other words, whether we think we can or think we can’t, we are right.
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Added by Michael Grove at 11:18 on December 17, 2017